Tue Oct 27
I don't particularly enjoy gymming. I mean, I don't hate it. But like every human, if given the perfect binary choice between "stay at home and eat crisps" and "go to the gym", I'd invariably pick "stay at home and eat crisps". I know it's bad for me, but I'm just lazy; we all are. I still stick to a "schedule", and...
I'll be taking a hiatus during November for travel and other things, so expect the Pagecord updates to go on hold too. There are still a few announcements to make on the blog, but those changes are actually already live – you just have to find them! 😊 I've put in a tonne of effort in the past few months and I love...
We spent our last night exploring Bozeman’s downtown, thick with activity and TVs tuned to a big football game between the Montana State Bobcats and the Idaho Vandals. It was a shock to the system after our adventure that benefited from the late season and reduced number of folks at the parks. I’ve mostly documented...
Oh, the year was 2026.How I wish I was in Nova Scotia now.I am not, though. I grew up there and lived near Chester, on the South Shore, until my 20s when I moved to France for a year that ended up turning into 20.The most distressing news crossed my feed the other day:Nova Scotia to host massive data centre to power...
The American actor, who died on Monday at the age of ninety, was best known for his portrayal of Russian navigator Chekov, on the star ship USS Enterprise, in the Star Trek original TV series, from 1966 to 1969, and the subsequent movies. I obviously don’t follow the sci-fi show as much as I used to, and was...
Cheers to Herman and his latest approach to upvotes on Bear Blog. I started this blog on Bear, and I still think it’s a wonderful service. I appreciate Herman’s thoughtful, principled approach to building and evolving it. I struggled with the upvotes, though. I don’t love upvoting in general and have written about...
Rogallo v3.3.0 has been released. This update adds the ability to ignore some types of errors you may encounter when navigating Geminispace. The update was prompted by the fact that, yesterday, the certificate for AstroBotany expired. Rogallo, quite rightly, alerted me to this and didn't carry on with loading the...
Last night was a perfect night for an outdoor gathering at one of our local breweries, Appalachian Mountain Brewery in Mills River. We were there a month ago, and half of us spent a good part of the night squinting into the setting sun. Last night, we sat at a different table and didn't have that problem.We chose...
The stuffies aren’t asked how they feelabout the state of the playroom, the waythey’re tossed, or disemboweled of stuffing;to them, the world is a ballin the clutches of a monster.It noses the sphere, wanting a playmatewhen ruinous diversion tempts–and to burn down the playgroundwhen its interest is lost.The world...
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I clean my house: how i clean my house In that post, I noted that Step One is "put everything back where it goes." I also noted that this can be hard to do when some things do not have a designated Place Where They Go. Here's how to make sure everything in your house has a Place...
This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader...
After the VS Code theme, I built a Chrome theme based on my website colors. I built light and dark versions, so you can choose the one that suits you better.
AI and vibe coding is nothing new to me, but today I finally gave vibe reverse engineering (or better said, reverse vibing?) a try. To scratch an itch I had for a long time: downloading invoices from o2 Business. There are three mobile contracts in two different accounts on my name for various family members. All...
To the absence of kitty treats Snowapple does not have diabetes but in my morning (and evening) ritual to give the diabetic creatures their insulin, kitty treats are involved as a consolation prize for the whole 'getting stabbed in the neck with needles' bit. However because I'm not a monster (debatable, hold that...
Back when I used Windows, over ten years ago, I had a serious case of Mac envy, all because of Notational Velocity, a lightning-fast note-taking app. Its signature look, with the list of notes at the top and the selected note’s text below, came with full keyboard control and a global shortcut to start a new note....
Daytrip to Smithfield, VA Sunday was a perfect fall day. Too perfect to spend at home. So we made the 100-minute drive southwest to Smithfield, VA. If that sounds familiar it's probably because Smithfield, Inc. is the world's largest producer of pork products. You've most likely picked up their bacon at the grocery...
I sat down to meditate last night, and an unpleasant thought popped into my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut and used all my mental energy to stop the thought - it was a visual thought that I didn't want to see. I promptly identified it as an intrusive thought, as I have identified many other "intrusive" thoughts over...
A new annual series and accompanying conference has been launched: Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing (OSPAIC). The executive editor of OSPAIC is Seth Lazar (Johns Hopkins). Its associate editors are Jeffrey Howard (UCL) and Rachael Sterken (University of Hong Kong). Ned Howells-Whitaker (JHU and...
My wife has kidney stones, the last two days have been spent waiting in A&E, then waiting for a CT scan, then waiting for assessments, waiting waiting. I still love the NHS though. Our motorhome —Vera—needs an assessment too, an altercation with a roadside rock (on a small narrow road) has damaged the passenger...
In the kitchen, I’ve got this humongous sansevieria plant… Well, actually, it’s a number of plants in the same pot: This sansevieria variety has only a single leaf per plant, and then it propagates by setting out a new rhizome that then has a single leaf. Allegedly. So when I bought it a decade ago, it was just one...
Like this post? Donate to me so I can keep writing. Ever since discovering that I could write my novels in plain text and or Markdown, and also that I could write my fiction podcast scripts in a plain text syntax called Fountain, I began wondering what other plain text avenues I could explore, and if I could adapt...
The Gate of the Feral GodsAuthor: Matt DinnimanGenre: Sci-fiReleased: 2021Rating: ★★★☆☆New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure. You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent. Surviving in a multilevel dungeon that also happens to be the set of the galaxy’s most watched game show...
Late again. Apparently writing weekly notes on time is still a work in progress. LOL.The vibeExcited, frustrated, and finally relieved. I was really looking forward to the Duo, and the runaround took a lot of the fun out of it. By the weekend, I was ready to be done with the whole ordeal and just enjoy the phone. It...
I’m grateful for the IndieWeb community. I feel as if I’ve found my online tribe here. I think I first discovered the IndieWeb somewhere around June 2026. I’ve had blogs way before that, but until the beginning of 2026, I don’t think anybody ever read them and I always felt like I was missing some kind of community....
(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a real story, and an excerpt from chapter 12 of my book Shift Happens.) The keyboards of the first teletypes looked as if the Shift Wars had happened in an alternate timeline won by typewriters with two Shifts, a century...
A couple of weeks ago I quietly removed the upvote count from the discovery feed on Bear. The upvote button is still there on every post, and upvotes still decide what ends up on Trending. You just can’t see the numbers next to each post anymore. I made the change for two reasons. The first is that visible counts...
My new, standalone dark fantasy book is out! The Demon's Peace is out now everywhere in ebook, paperback, and hardback. She buried her daughter. Made a deal with a demon. Then went hunting. When Sabyse's daughter is murdered on her wedding day, the corrupt authorities can't help. Thaena Ashmore can. She's a...
I have turned on airplane mode on all my devices, the plane is now moving, preparing for flight. Waiting in the airport I played a bunch of Castlevania Symphony of the Night—I managed to reach the second boss fight which is a very cool encounter!—-but I plan to read during the flight ahead. Perhaps I’ll finish Dune...
Every September, as the melt season on the Greenland ice sheet fizzles out, I and my colleague Martin Stendel do the same thing: we sit down with a year’s worth of daily surface mass balance maps and weather charts from the Polar Portal, work out how the ice sheet fared, and write it up as a guest post for Carbon...
October 2026. Brighton. On the way back from Ford to Rye now, an eight train journey but with four Beer Guide ticks (“half a BRAPA”) in the bag. Four pints in 2 hours, really important not to mix it up with coffee. Puccino’s at Worthing station, the “indie” Pumpkin ?, give you a little biscuit that makes you feel...
Well, today was a day almost entirely lost to the infuriating, time-consuming, soul-sapping business of dealing with a banking fraud. It was an ingenious and thoroughly plausible one, and fortunately, in the end, the damage was undone, but Lord it was a long, exhausting haul. Inevitably, after much online to and fro...